Baroque and Rococo
Baroque is examined as a rhetoric of persuasion - light, movement, theatrical staging and the fusion of architecture, sculpture and painting - and Rococo as its courtly, decorative retreat. The exam wants you to distinguish the two, not to call everything before 1750 Baroque.
Core rules and concepts
- Naturalism and light. Caravaggio's tenebrism (a single hard, raking light source, deep shadow) places sacred events among ordinary bodies and dirty feet; the Calling of Saint Matthew (1599–1600) makes light itself the agent of grace.
- Movement and theatre. Bernini dissolves the boundary between sculpture, architecture and light: the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–52) is a stage set with a hidden window and gilded rays; the colonnade of Saint Peter's orchestrates a procession. Borromini works the opposite way, turning geometry fluid at San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1638–67).
- Colour and brushwork. Rubens's open, loaded brush and diagonal compositions; Velázquez's atmosphere and double space in Las Meninas (1656); Rembrandt's late impasto and psychological light; the Dutch Golden Age as a market-driven, largely secular art.
- National variants. Spanish Golden Age (Zurbarán, Velázquez, Murillo), Flemish Baroque, French academic Baroque under Louis XIV at Versailles, and the late Baroque retable in Spain.
- Rococo. After about 1715: asymmetry, pastel, ornament, the fête galante (Watteau, Pilgrimage to Cythera, 1717), Boucher's mythology, Tiepolo's ceiling frescoes and the Churrigueresque altarpiece.
Worked example
Faced with the Calling of Saint Matthew, describe a dark tavern-like room, a single high window as the only light source, the beam falling across Christ's pointing hand towards Matthew, the tax collector's gesture of "me?", the two worlds (contemporary dress versus barefoot apostles) and the shallow stage set. Then interpret: divine grace arrives as a physical light beam, and the painting is a theological argument in realist form. Never stop at "he uses chiaroscuro".
Traps that cost marks
- Rococo is not merely "late Baroque": it changes subject-matter and values towards the private, decorative and gallant.
- Tenebrism (extreme directional darkness) is not the same as general chiaroscuro.
- Las Meninas is not a portrait of the Infanta; its subject is the space and the act of painting.
- Bernini's sculpture must be described together with its architecture and light source.